Red End
by Montressor-Purple
Summary: Jane meets Red John under less-than-ideal circumstances. Written for the "Jane VS Hostage Situation" Challenge on the CBS boards. Rated for character death.


**Author's Note: This was written for the "Jane VS Hostage Situation" challenge on the CBS boards. It's a little shorter than I'd like it to be, so I may rewrite it in the future.**

**Disclaimer: Bruno Heller won't even loan them to me. Shame.**

Red End

It was a perfect arrangement. No clumsy explanations were needed, nor were they provided. They were unnecessary because, within seconds of consciousness, the man in the chair knew who he was, where he was, and why he was here. He was Patrick Jane; that part was easy enough. Even at his darkest hour when he had been deemed a hazard to himself and the rest of humanity, when doctors in white coats had struggled to glean so much as a word from him, he had retained his sense of identity.

As for his location, he recognized it instantly. He saw this place in his nightmares and in his memories. He saw this room as his eyes closed on one lonely day and as they opened on another. It was his bedroom. _Our bedroom_, he thought before correcting himself. No, the person with whom the room had been shared was dead. It was just _his_ bedroom now, the keystone of Patrick Jane's solitary existence.

And the reason he was here? There was only one reason Jane would be bound to a chair positioned artfully before a mural painted in the blood of his wife and daughter. There was only one person who would know the most effective way to torture him. There was only one person thoughtful enough to shine a spotlight on the bloody grimace on the wall. Patrick Jane knew this. He knew why he was here. He was here because _He_ had brought him here. Him. Red John.

Jane liked to think he understood death. It was a debt owed by the living, the end of the line, the inevitable. But that didn't stop from him fearing it, however. Grace would say that his fear of death stemmed from his fear of hellfire, but Jane knew it came from, well, the absence of life. There remained so much in life to be discovered that dying felt like leaving a case unclosed. It was this inherent curiosity that caused Jane to ask a question to the room.

"What do you want?" Jane's voice was hoarse; it crackled and rasped. Despite this, his voice was devoid of fear. There was only silence. The murdering bastard was _playing_ with him. Well Jane was not going to play along. The silence stretched on. One minute. Three. After what Jane estimated to be five minutes, something rustled behind him. It was a dry, papery sound, engineered to unnerve him.

"Why don't we talk face-to-face?" Jane suggested. "We both know why we're here. Sitting in silence is just anti-climactic, don't you think?" He hoped to god his voice didn't betray his emotions, the tenuous balance of fear and anger raging in his usually-level head.

"Face-to-face? There's no need for that," a voice replied from behind Jane's left ear. "You've imagined my face long enough, I imagine. Why supply you with that which your nightmares have already given you?" Jane stiffened. The voice was surprisingly smooth, even sophisticated. It was not the coarse, grating voice he had always imagined as belonging to his family's killer. In fact, the voice seemed almost familiar. Jane tried furiously to identify its owner, but for once, his impressive memory failed him. Instead, Jane diverted his concentration to the conversation at hand.

"You're here to kill me, I suppose. I don't get many visitors around here, though. My body won't be discovered for days. Doesn't really feed to your flair for the dramatic discoveries of bodies, does it?" Jane was rambling. Anything to buy time. He was successful. His captor paused a moment before replying.

"Well done, Mr. Jane. It appears you can be a cheap, lying fraud without being a complete idiot," he countered. "No, your body will be found very soon, don't you worry about that. In fact, I'll see to it that your friends are the first ones to stumble upon your mutilated corpse." It took Jane a moment to realize Red John was referring to his coworkers, the CBI agents. They were the only "friends" he had, come to think of it. "Let's give them a call now," the smooth voice continued. Behind him, Jane could hear a series of beeps. Red John must have stolen his cell phone. "I think I'll have you call that Lisbon character. You and she were close, weren't you? Maybe I'll even pay her a visit, myself, sometime."

The phone was pressed over Jane's mouth, accompanied by the cold tip of a knife at the base of his neck. "When she answers, you will tell her you're being held against your will in your own house. Tell her I'm willing to negotiate for your freedom. Say anything else and I'll see to it that she doesn't live to repeat your words," Jane's captor instructed him.

It felt almost surreal hearing his boss over the phone when he was in such a dire situation.

"What is it, Jane?" Lisbon's voice was groggy and it struck Jane that he had no idea what time it was. Probably very early in the morning.

"Hello, Lisbon." Jane's voice was deliberately calm. "I'm with a man who says to tell you I'm being held against my will in my house. He's willing to negotiate for my freedom," he recited.

"Jane? What the hell is-" Lisbon's words were cut off as Red John closed the phone with a decisive _snap_.

"A hostage negotiation team should be here in an hour," Red John chuckled in Jane's ear. "Imagine what they'll find once they actually enter the house." As if to emphasize his point, he rasped his fingernails along the flat of the knife. Jane's brain supplied the images.

This was not the ending Jane had planned. He had envisioned hunting down his family's killer. Making him pay. Making Red John feel truly sorry for the destruction of his life and the lives of his wife and daughter. But instead, the roles were reversed. Red John was the one with the weapon, the one who would walk away alive and _Jane_ was the one about to die at the end of a butcher's knife. It was ironic in a terrible sort of way.

Jane knew he should say something witty or threatening, anything to hurt his captor. Words were on his lips, but they died there the moment Red John strode into his field of vision.

"You!" was all Jane could manage. The identity of the murderer stunned him as effectively as a slap across the face.

"Yes, Patrick. Me," was Red John's reply. "You're surprised, I take it? Of course you are. It's always the same with your type; you think you know everything, you think you're in control, but all you are is arrogant. You are arrogant and blind, Patrick Jane. Your arrogance killed your family and your blindness has caused _your_ death."

Through his rage, Jane could see everything with remarkable clarity. A smile that could only be described as insane warped Red John's features. The long butcher knife glinted cruelly in the lamplight as it swung from the fingers of his left hand. On his right hand was a rubber kitchen glove. Jane could see everything and he could see he was going to die. Red John would kill him and then all that remained of the Jane family would be a pair of grinning faces on a wall. The Jane family tree scrawled out with their lives' blood and a rubber glove.

Patrick Jane did not see his life flash before his eyes. He did not see his family. Instead he saw Red John and the knife. Then all he saw was red.


End file.
